Mabel ☆ History ☆ Writing ☆ Art
Mabel Dodge Luhan
Mabel Dodge Luhan - In Her Own Words
Mabel Dodge Luhan’s words describe Taos of the early 1900s and the home that she and her husband Tony built on the edge of Taos Pueblo land.
Historic photographs give the reader a view into that home and the friends who peopled their days.
Purchase this book from The Mabel Dodge Luhan House by calling (800) 846-2235 . Proceeds benefit preservation of Mabel’s home.
$59.00
Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality by Mabel Dodge Luhan
In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account, long out-of-print, of her first few months in New Mexico is a remarkable description of an Easterner’s journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation.
The geography of New Mexico and the culture of the Pueblo Indians opened a new world for Mabel. She settled in Taos immediately and lived there the rest of her life. Much of this book describes her growing fascination with Antonio Luhan of Taos Pueblo, whom she subsequently married. Her descriptions of the appeal of primitive New Mexico to a world-weary New Yorker are still fresh and moving.
“I finished it in a state of amazed revelation… it is so beautifully compact and consistent…. It is going to help many another woman and man to ‘take life with the talons’ and carry it high.”
– Ansel Adams
Winter in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan
Winter in Taos starkly contrasts Luhan’s memoirs, published in four volumes and inspired by Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past. They follow her life through three failed marriages, numerous affairs, and ultimately a feeling of “being nobody in myself,” despite years of psychoanalysis and a luxurious lifestyle on two continents among the leading literary, art and intellectual personalities of the day.
Winter in Taos unfolds in an entirely different pattern, uncluttered with noteworthy names and ornate details. With no chapters dividing the narrative, Luhan describes her simple life in Taos, New Mexico, this “new world” she called it, from season to season, following a thread that spools out from her consciousness as if she’s recording her thoughts in a journal. “My pleasure is in being very still and sensing things,” she writes, sharing that pleasure with the reader by describing the joys of adobe rooms warmed in winter by aromatic cedar fires; fragrant in spring with flowers; and scented with homegrown fruits and vegetables being preserved and pickled in summer.
Having wandered the world, Luhan found her home at last in Taos. Winter in Taos celebrates the spiritual connection she established with the “deep living earth” as well as the bonds she forged with Tony Luhan, her “mountain.” This moving tribute to a land and the people who eked a life from it reminds readers that in northern New Mexico, where the seasons can be harshly beautiful, one can bathe in the sunshine until “untied are the knots in the heart, for there is nothing like the sun for smoothing out all difficulties.”
Utopian Vistas by Lois Rudnick
Mabel Dodge Luhan, hostess and visionary, made Taos, New Mexico, a center for artists and utopians when she moved there in 1917 and began inviting friends to visit her.
Now available in paperback,Utopian Vistas is a chronicle of the house Luhan built in Taos and the poets, painters, photographers, film-makers, writers, educators, and visionaries whose lives and works were affected by the house and its environs.
Rudnick weaves a complex tapestry depicting American countercultures in New Mexico from the 1920s to the 1990s.
Lois Rudnick is professor emerita of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she chaired the American Studies Department for 26 years. She now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan
Edited by Lois Rudnick
Internationally known as a writer, hostess, and patron of the arts of the twentieth century, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) is not known for her experiences with venereal disease, unmentioned in her four-volume published memoir. Making the suppressed portions of Luhan’s memoirs available for the first time, well-known biographer and cultural critic Lois Rudnick examines Luhan’s life through the lenses of venereal disease, psychoanalysis, and sexology. She shows us a mover and shaker of the modern world whose struggles with identity, sexuality, and manic depression speak to the lives of many women of her era.
Restricted at the behest of her family until the year 2000, Rudnick’s edition of these remarkable documents represents the culmination of more than thirty-five years of study of Luhan’s life, writings, lovers, friends, and Luhan’s social and cultural milieus in Italy, New York, and New Mexico. They open up new pathways to understanding late Victorian and early modern American and European cultures in the person of a complex woman who led a life filled with immense passion and pain.
New Woman, New Worlds by Lois Rudnick
She was “the most peculiar common denominator that society, literature, art and radical revolutionaries ever found in New York and Europe.” So claimed a Chicago newspaper reporter in the 1920s of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who attracted leading literary and intellectual figures to her circle for over four decades. Not only was she mistress of a grand salon, an American Madame de Stael, she was also a leading symbol of the New Woman: sexually emancipated, self-determining, and in control of her destiny. In many ways, her life is the story of America’s emergence from the Victorian age.
Lois Rudnick has written a unique and definitive biography that examines all aspects of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s real and imagined lives, drawing on fictional portraits of Mabel, including those by D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and Gertrude Stein, as well as on Mabel’s own voluminous memoirs, letters, and fiction. Rudnick not only assesses Mabel as muse to men of genius but also considers her seriously as a writer, activist, and spirit of the age.
This biography will appeal not just to cultural historians but to any woman who has loved and lived with men who are artists and rebels. Both as a liberated woman and as a legend, Mabel Dodge Luhan embodies the cultural forces that shaped modern America.
Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan
Edited by Lois Rudnick
Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Intimate Memories details Mabel Dodge Luhan’s assemblage of a series of utopian domains aimed at curing the malaise of the modern age and shows Luhan not just as a visionary hostess but as a talented and important writer.
Luhan began to write her autobiography in 1924, a process that took over a decade and resulted in a 1,600-page, four-volume opus that was published serially under the title Intimate Memories. Luhan’s memoirs are a fascinating eyewitness account of the United States’s entrance into modernity that take us from Victorian Buffalo, through fin de siécle Florence, into the radical heartland of pre-World War I Greenwich Village, and end with her “discovery” of the Indian Southwest as a place of personal and cultural renewal.
Luhan wrote her memoirs from the point of view of a rebel who had spent much of her adult life constructing a series of utopian domains that were intended to overturn “the whole ghastly social structure” under which she felt the United States had been buried since the Victorian era.
History
Remarkable Women of Taos
Edited by Liz Cunningham
How is it that one small mountain town in northern New Mexico has succeeded in attracting and sustaining so many remarkable women over the years? This central question is at the heart of this exciting new celebratory book, The Remarkable Women of Taos.
This book is the natural outgrowth of an unprecedented year-long community celebration honoring outstanding historic and contemporary women of Taos. The 167 women portrayed here share their passions, accomplishments, and advice – as well as their stories of challenges overcome.
Taken together, these narratives provide a sampling of the breadth and depth of the remarkable women who call Taos home. From Mabel Dodge Luhan and Agnes Martin to Sherrie McGraw, Corina Santistevan and Sharon Dry Flower Reyna of today, Remarkable Women reveals the centuries-long role women have played in shaping this one-of-a-kind community.
A Life in Full: Millicent Rogers by Arthur Bachrach
Millicent Rogers, though born into opulence and followed by the paparazzi, kept private many of her unique talents and skills.
She loved books, she was a multi-linguist, and was involved in espionage during WWII, saving lives from the talons of Hitler. She created beautiful surroundings filling them with books, art, and fine furniture. She was well-known for her own sense of style and beauty, and loved many men though she kept her deepest love for her sons as far away from the public eye as possible.
At the end of her life Millicent Rogers lived in a more humble home in Taos than any of her other homes. In the hamlet that Taos was then, she surrounded herself with new multicultural friends, from artists and writers to laborers, supporting many of them.
This book, with its many photographs, opens doors into Millicent’s life that have been long obscured. Millicent’s surviving son Arturo Peralta-Ramos II has written a poignant forward in tribute to his remarkable mother. Arturo and his brother Paul were good friends with Arthur Bachrach and the trio spent many hours exchanging stories and anecdotes, especially about Millicent.
Pueblo Indians of New Mexico by P & K Nickens
Beginning about 1900, tourism greatly increased in the American Southwest, chiefly a response to the combined promotional efforts of the Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company.
Postcard images of Southwestern Native Americans in particular became a mainstay of a widespread advertising campaign to promote the region to potential travelers.
Postcards also quickly became popular with visitors as collectibles and for expedient communications with friends and family back home. In New Mexico, hundreds of published images portrayed the beauty of the Pueblo villages, as well as views of economic and domestic activities, arts and crafts, and religious aspects of the various Pueblo communities in the northern part of the state.
Featuring more than 220 vintage postcard images of New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians from their personal collection, Tucson authors Paul and Kathleen Nickens offer a companion volume to their previous Arcadia book, Native Americans of Arizona. The selected views, along with associated narrative, reveal the early beginnings of a long-standing interaction between the Pueblos and tourism.
Writing
The True Secret of Writing by Natalie Goldberg
Sit. Walk. Write. These are the barest bones of Natalie Goldberg’s revolutionary writing and life practice, which she presents here in book form for the first time. A whole new slant on writing that she developed since the publication of her classic Writing Down the Bones, True Secret workshops have been limited until now to small, intensive groups at a remote center in the rural Southwest. In The True Secret of Writing, Goldberg makes this popular seminar available to any reader.
The True Secret is for everyone, like eating and sleeping. It allows you to discover something real about your life, to mine the rich awareness in your mind, and to ground and empower yourself. Goldberg guides you through your own personal or group retreat, illuminating the steps of sitting in silent open mind, walking anchored to the earth, and writing without criticism. Just as Goldberg cuts through her students’ resistance with her no-nonsense instruction – “Shut up and write” – the True Secret cuts to the core of realizing yourself and your world.
The capstone to forty years of teaching, The True Secret of Writing is Goldberg’s Zen boot camp, her legacy teaching. Stories of Natalie’s own search for truth and clarity and her students’ breakthroughs and insights give moving testament to how brilliantly her unique, tough-love method works. Beautiful homages to the work of other great teachers and observers of mind, life, and love provide further secrets and inspiration to which readers will return again and again.
In her inimitable way, Goldberg will inspire you to pick up the pen, get writing, and keep going. The True Secret of Writing will help you with your writing – and your life.
D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico by Arthur Bachrach
David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, England, in 1885. In 1914, he married Frieda Von Richtofen, a German national and distant cousin of the German war ace, “The Red Baron” von Richthofen. While living on the Coast of Cornwall in 1917, they were harassed and accused of being spies for Germany.
By 1921, the Lawrences were living in Italy and D. H. had won international acclaim for his writings. Mabel Dodge Sterne invited the pair to her home in Taos, New Mexico. Traveling by way of Ceylon, Australia, Tahiti, and, finally, San Francisco, the Lawrences set foot in New Mexico for the first time in 1922. Although he traveled all over the world, Lawrence was never as happy anywhere as he was in Taos.
Arthur Bachrach has lived in Taos for over twenty years, and he has come to know people who freely recalled the Lawrences. They shared information about the circle of artists and friends who surrounded the Lawrences and their lifestyles. Bachrach provides information on Lawrence’s writings and the influence living in the mountains of New Mexico had upon him.
D. H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis while visiting France in 1930, and five years later, his ashes were placed in a memorial on his beloved Kiowa Ranch near Taos. Given to the University of New Mexico in the 1950s by D. H.’s widow, the ranch is known today as the D. H. Lawrence Ranch.
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers is the critically-acclaimed story of Paul Morel, a second son who must discover his own identity in the shadow of his mother’s overwhelming presence and influence.
A budding artist, Paul must choose between his responsibility to his mother and his desire to explore the world and fall in love.
Faced with the chance for a future with two different women, Paul must decide what he truly wants and whose opinion – his own or his mother’s – matters most.
This semi-autobiographical novel explores the emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and the suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers. It is a pre-Freudian exploration of love and possessiveness.
Art
Life, Paint and Passion by Michele Cassou
Life, Paint And Passion is a deeply involving approach to using the creative process as a tool for self-discovery. With vibrant and contagious enthusiasm, the authors liberate the reader’s urge to create freely and spontaneously, as a painter or an artist in another medium, purely for the process of exploration, not for result.
With eloquence and simplicity, the authors encourage the reader to journey inward toward his or her authentic self and discover the unique intuition awaiting there. It is this intuition that provides all the tools the reader needs to crumble the barrier between the innermost self and its uncensored manifestation.
Through lively interviews with students, the authors explore painting as a practice that facilitates the ecstasy of unfettered expression. With simple brushes, a few dishes of paint, and this book, the reader will be able to coax the hidden self out of the heart and onto a paper.
Life, Paint And Passion is the result of nearly thirty years of intensive work with the painting process. It provides powerful insights into the act of creation, a solid base for facing and transcending creative blocks, and brings fresh perceptions and healing to life.
Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe by Hunter Philp
Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the most successful American artists of the twentieth century: her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes and stark white cow skulls are seminal works of modern art.
Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe offers a portrayal of her life.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s long and prolific life lasted nearly a century, but much of it was comparatively uneventful. Her farm girl childhood in Wisconsin and the retreat to New Mexico that occupied the second half of her life were separated by a glamorous period – a thirty-year sojourn in bohemian New York, where she was for a time the wife, muse, and protégée of the aging photographer Alfred Stieglitz. It was he who promoted her as an artist, and initially O’Keeffe struggled to assert her autonomy.
Philp’s biography painstakingly assembles the details of O’Keeffe’s life – love letters, financial problems, a schoolteacher who said that her drawing of a child’s hand was too small. “Where I come from, the earth means everything,” O’Keeffe said, and she seems to have lived most of her life in accordance with this principle.